


Split the Air.

by sapote



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Angst, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-14
Updated: 2008-01-14
Packaged: 2017-10-17 22:26:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/181928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapote/pseuds/sapote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A fix for how fast Ianto moved on from his dead robot girlfriend, or: my last chance to write dark!Ianto before I got Jossed by season 2. Written for .</p>
            </blockquote>





	Split the Air.

Ianto remembered this feeling; the rasp of his own breathing in his ears, the silence after the gunshots, and that strange - absence, like a door had opened and then shut.

He looked down; he looked up at Owen's shaking hand. His ears were ringing. Owen's fingers were white on the gun, and Ianto thought, it should have been me.

Ianto Jones had been a liar for a very long time. At first, when he'd hauled the Cyberchair, piece by piece, down the long gray corridors, he'd been sure that Jack had known. As he worked in the early hours of the morning, building up that hateful arachnid shell around the metal body of a girl he used to know, he rehearsed Jack's sentences in his head, his gestures, the little jokes. Surely it was a code, Ianto decided - a way of letting him know that Jack was onto him. It was impossible to hide a whole person in the basement forever, he told himself, as he took the long spiral staircase down into the lower levels of the Hub. Some of the Weevils had been there for years, closed in those little gray cells. They had problems with skin fungus, after a while. Ianto was in charge of sunning the Weevils, when he wasn't ordering takeout and cleaning up Owen's disgusting messes. It required a light pole, and some dexterity.

Ianto wondered if he should set up a sunlamp for Lisa. He wondered how long, exactly, he could expect her to be down there.  
Ianto hated the lower levels of the Hub - the claustrophobic hallways, the perpetual smell of mildew, the dark, recycled air. But he still slept there most nights, or sat awake, chin propped on his steepled fingers, watching Lisa breathe in the dark. He didn't want her to be down there alone.

Ianto got used to lying, though, even though he told himself it was just in case. He laughed at Owen's cyberman jokes, even though he wanted to punch him, and he didn't start or flinch when Jack came up behind him, laid a hand on his shoulder, asked him how he was doing. He went through the day pleasantly, mechanically, and after - after Lisa died, he kept going. He just kept moving, like if he stopped he'd come apart.

 

No one really talked to him, after it happened. He watched them distantly; coldly. He remembered the guns in their hands, and Jack's gun against his temple, and hated them very quietly, and smiled pleasantly, and brought them coffee. No one mentioned it. They forgot; they pretended to forget, and it became real, and he pretended that he'd let it go, somehow, and they believed him.

(The empty shell rattled on the decking; Ianto's pulse was static in his ears, and he heard, with a bright and immediate clarity, the rain of spent shells on the concrete floor of the lower level, the cold faces, the raised guns.)

Jack took him to dinner, asked him how he was doing, watched him carefully from across the white-clothed table. Jack was all big broad American vowels and he was pushy, overpersonal, his hand on Ianto's wrist, his voice in Ianto's ears. Jack told him stories with all the facts taken out of them, and Ianto watched him, the words running past him, and thought, liar. Oscar Wilde wrote that each man kills the thing he loves best, and Ianto wondered, listening to the flatness of Jack's voice, what Jack had killed. Ianto was fairly sure that Jack would never tell him.

Jack - Jack _touched_ , all the time, because he needed to, and Ianto had trained himself for so long not to start at Jack's voice, at Jack's hand on his shoulder, that he didn't pull away from Jack's fingertips at his neck, Jack's hand at his waist, Jack's mouth on his. Ianto sat awake, his chin on his steepled fingers, watching Jack breathe in the dark hub at night, and thought about the line of blood down Lisa's face.

Ianto thought, after the telepathy pendant, that Toshiko knew - that strange look she'd given him, her fingertips to her throat - and then, when Mary was so many molecules of superheated ash, Ianto knew that she knew. She never said a word to Jack, and she never said a word to him, but when it was just the two of them in the Hub, sometimes, he would go and sit by her, a few feet apart, watching the screens.

It wasn't Ianto. It was Gwen - golden Gwen, the apple of the Captain's eye, who betrayed Jack, and it was Owen's fingers on the gun. Ianto looked up at Owen's white, sick, defiant face, looked down at the trickle of blood running down Jack's face, and thought, that should have been me.

**Author's Note:**

> Beta thanks to !


End file.
